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Our opponents themselves are driven by stress of fact to admit
the necessity of a prior to body, a higher thing, some phase or
form of soul; their "pneuma" [finer-body or spirit] is
intelligent, and they speak of an "intellectual fire"; this
"fire" and "spirit" they imagine to be necessary to the existence
of the higher order which they conceive as demanding some base,
though the real difficulty, under their theory, is to find a base
for material things whose only possible base is, precisely, the
powers of soul.
Besides, if they make life and soul no more than this "pneuma,"
what is the import of that repeated qualification of theirs "in a
certain state," their refuge when they are compelled to recognize
some acting principle apart from body? If not every pneuma is a
soul, but thousands of them soulless, and only the pneuma in this
"certain state" is soul, what follows? Either this "certain
state," this shaping or configuration of things, is a real being
or it is nothing.
If it is nothing, only the pneuma exists, the "certain state"
being no more than a word; this leads imperatively to the
assertion that Matter alone exists, Soul and God mere words, the
lowest alone is.
If on the contrary this "configuration" is really existent-
something distinct from the underlie or Matter, something
residing in Matter but itself immaterial as not constructed out
of Matter, then it must be a Reason-Principle, incorporeal, a
separate Nature.
There are other equally cogent proofs that the soul cannot be any
form of body.
Body is either warm or cold, hard or soft, liquid or solid, black
or white, and so on through all the qualities by which one is
different from another; and, again, if a body is warm it diffuses
only warmth, if cold it can only chill, if light its presence
tells against the total weight which if heavy it increases;
black, it darkens; white, it lightens; fire has not the property
of chilling or a cold body that of warming.
Soul, on the contrary, operates diversely in different living
beings, and has quite contrary effects in any one: its
productions contain the solid and the soft, the dense and the
sparse, bright and dark, heavy and light. If it were material,
its quality- and the colour it must have- would produce one
invariable effect and not the variety actually observed.
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